This is not to say that those cards are bad in this match-up, they are just not nearly as good as people think they are here. If you notice, the best cards against u/w are cheap or have resisitence to countermagic.

There are three primary ways to defeat u/w decks on a strategic level.1) Be very fast. Boros and Mono-R can be tough and any really fast aggro deck can duck under enough countermagic to defeat u/w. For instance, people who play Vampires and think Malakir Bloodwitch is the solution are likely to be disappointed. Lacerators and Pulse Trackers are actually much more effective against u/w. That said, a Lacerator Pulse Tracker deck might be much worse against the rest of the field, I am just saying that speed is far more effective against u/w than pro:white. Duress is better than Mindsludge against us, and even Mire Toll might be superior.

2) Run us out of cards. Our strategy requires us to draw a ton of cards to play our game. In addition, we dedicate a huge percentage of our deck to fighting attacking creatures and beating cards of Jund's colors. Ranger/Crab, Howling Mine/Jacerator, Halimar Excavator/Join the Ranks, these are all bad for us. Obviously this plan is not for everyone.

3) Attack us from a variety of angles with powerful cards. If an opponent is not a hyper aggro deck or a mill-deck, the best way to gain edge over us is to have a variety of ways of threatening us and have cards we do not expect so that we can't play around them properly. If we know your list, we can gain at LEAST 3-5% right out of the gate versus if we don't.

We have edge over Jund primarily because we have a lot of presideboarded cards, a ton of counter-magic (which is good against them), they have a ton of dead cards, and we generally know their list. That said, Jund is still a challenging match-up and one or two minor slip-ups can be fatal. In addition, if the Jund player's deck is unorthodox, we can start falling behind until we figure out their list.

The reason for this is that Jund puts early pressure on us (Thrinax, Leech, Stag), has natural ways to fight counter magic (Stag, Manlands, Bloodbraid), Discard (Duress, Blightning), Burn (Haste creatures, Bolt), Planeswalkers (Garruk), fatties (Malakir Bloodwitch), creatures that need to be wrathed (Stag, Siege Gang), creatures that can't be wrathed (Thrinax, Manlands), removal for Baneslayers that is not dead otherwise (Maelstrom Pusle), Land Destruction (Ruinblaster), and so on. The point is, our cards match-up great against theirs in general (by design), however if they can hit us from enough angles we can end up with the wrong answers at the wrong times. This is particularly true at levels below the Pro Tour because if u/w and Jund are played at 95% U/W has a nice edge, but if both are played at 80%, Jund starts really pulling ahead as the proficiency curve is nowhere near as sharp. The most common manifestation of this is when the Jund player just follows the script of his curve and it works out fine, whereas the U/W player is continually giving themself fewer and less ideal options with Halimar Depths, Treasure Hunt, and Jace than they would, as well as playing the wrong answer in a given moment. The result is that the u/w player can think they are following the script and actually never even see the options they are losing. For instance, sometimes Halimar Depths setting up a wrong order causes one to Hunt on the wrong turn, leaving only Flash Freeze instead of Cancel the turn that a Mind Rot gets played that leads to discarding a card that makes the u/w player have to Day of Judgement a turn earlier than they wanted instead of O-Ringing, which leads to a Siege Gang hitting with only an O-Ring in hand to deal with it, which leads to taking 9 extra damage from tokens over turns until they are wrathed, but now life total is so low that they have to use a counterspell on Lightning Bolt to the Face, when if they had more life opponent would have targeted Jace (which would have made the Jace in hand live). After using the last counterspell to stay alive from Bolt, the Jund player sticks a Bloodbraid Elf that attacks with Haste to kill (dodging O-Ring).

As you can imagine, most people are nowhere near experienced enough to realize that the reason they lost was not because the opponent had "one too many threats" or "They were one life point short." The real reason they lost is that they made a choice early on that was suboptimal and created a chain reaction that eventually lead to them losing. These suboptimal choices are usually library manipulation spells used wrong or answering a card with the wrong card or at the wrong time. You can't count on u/w opponents making these mistakes, but I assure you, not even Gabriel Nassif can make it through a game of u/w with out making mistakes, so while you can't count on any one mistake, you can count on your opponent making some mistakes throughout the game. The best way to increase the number and severity of these mistakes is to attack from a variety of angles, as every angle you attack from with multiply the potential impact of tiny errors they make early as well as make the game more and more difficult to play on their part (since there are so many variables going into decision tree).

This is not only true with Jund, but with any deck you might imagine that is full of quality cards (as opposed to hate decks, strange combo decks, etc). If your deck has high card quality (like Boss Naya, Mythic, Grixis, u/w/r) than attacking from a variety of angles is generally an effective way to combat u/w.

Some other notes: To fight u/w you MUST not cheat on mana. If your manabase is your weak point, u/w will exploit this, and not just with Tectonic Edge (also Jace- bouncing or fatesealing, permission, Chalice, Treasure Hunt, O-Ring, and more). In addition, attacking u/w's mana is generally not effective. It is not bad per say, but it is generally nowhere near as effective as it is to attack Grixis or u/w/r or Jund's mana. Goblin Ruinblaster, Edge, Spreading Seas, these are not scary at all for us. In fact, I dread the day that people realize just how effective Anathemancer is against us. It hits hard, kills Jace, can't be bounced well, fights countermagic, provides "virtual card advantage," and punishes us for doing what we want to do (where as Goblin Ruinblaster just makes our Treasure Hunts and Everflowing Chalices MUCH better). U/W is half mana and full of cheap spells and card draw, plus has the best manabase of any non-mono color deck in the format. It is not even close to realistic to beat it that way.

One final note, playing cards they don't expect is awesome, since if they don't have experience with u/w you can often outplay them anyway and if you hit them with stuff they have never seen (at least not with u/w) you can create a situation that they have no experience with. If your deck is one color, you are not going to beat them on card quality. If your deck is three or more colors, you are not going to beat them on consistency. What you can do is make it so difficult for them to figure out how to take control that they lose an inch here and there, as it generally doesn't even take a foot to crush them.__________________Patrick Chapin

Martin Juza had a plan this weekend, a White/Blue counterless control deck he got from fellow Czech Republican, Michal Hebky. It didn’t work out too well for him, but both Brian Kibler and Sam Black are floating near the top 16 with this spicy build. As you can see, I wasn’t kidding about Black looking for Fieldmist Borderposts and Divinations yesterday.